There are always a few geese to be seen there, but today there are masses of them. I'm not entirely sure what species they belong to, but at a guess, I'd say greylag (boz kaz; Anser anser), and they're floating by in a motley collection of plumages, some exactly as they appear in the textbooks, others predominantly white but with patches of brownish-grey coloring and identical orange beaks so that they blend in nicely. A pair of yellowy-brown goslings floating along behind their mother completes a perfect picture. The Kızılırmak is Turkey's longest river, rising near Sivas and flowing out to sea at Bafra after a journey of 1,355 kilometers. It's one of the biggest selling points of Avanos, the small town near Göreme which is otherwise most famous for its pottery (itself a byproduct of the river since the clay from which the pots are made is dredged from the riverbed). To encourage people to walk beside the river, the municipality has planted a fine stand of weeping willows and laid an esplanade along one bank, although weeds are already pushing up through the paving stones and the litter is accumulating.
For a moment, my mind slips back to a weird moment a few winters ago when I gazed down on the islet from the bridge and spotted a male ostrich standing on what is now home to the geese. Where it came from was never entirely clear, although one had to assume that it had been a plaything of some restaurant or another whose owner couldn't afford to feed it over the winter and had abandoned it to its fate on the islet.
The path along the riverbank arrives eventually at the wobbly bridge, a lesser-known curiosity of Avanos. Almost a decade ago, one of the additions to London, UK, was the Millennium Footbridge, which spanned the Thames between the Tate Modern art gallery and St. Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately, the engineers failed to road-test their elegant handiwork before unveiling it to the public, and the bridge opened and closed again in two days as people who walked across it complained of the nausea induced by its swaying.
If only the engineers had visited Avanos first, they could have learnt a thing or two about bridges that move underfoot. From sickening past experience, I've learnt to inch my way across the Kızılırmak footbridge very carefully indeed. The trouble is that there are those (mainly, but not exclusively, children) who love to feel the bridge sway and bounce up and down on its boardwalk floor until it becomes as vomit-inducing as the hairiest ride in a Luna Park. Now, of course, it's school holidays, and by the time, I reach terra firma on the far side, the honking geese are all but forgotten as my stomach heaves and turns.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
